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The Four Pillars of Yoga

June 30, 2019

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“The traditional yogic texts say that a yogic life is built on four pillars, and attending Satsang is one of those. The other three are: simplicity, leading a simple life without excess, without ostentation, without wastage. . . . truthfulness, a yogi is dedicated to being truthful—and more than just truthful in a factual sense, but leading an authentic life. . . . the third one is seva, or service, to lead a life that’s not based on getting as much as you can for yourself, but of giving as much as you can to the world. . . . Now, a Satsang, for those of you who haven’t been to one, the word “Sat” you’ll notice appears a lot in our discourse here, Sat refers to the Supreme Beingness, the truth of what we are when we take away all of the falseness and the mediated and artificial aspects of our self, when we get down to what is natural and eternal in ourselves. And yoga means “yoke,” union. . . . You know we tend to think that that it’s only people out there who sabotage our happiness, but it’s actually we who are responsible for that; we set that up. And once we assume our own responsibility for our happiness, then life begins to get a lot better. . . . And gradually our intellect, our buddhi, becomes clearer and clearer, and we begin to realize the ways that we’d been sabotaging ourselves on subtler and subtler levels until we get to the root of the phantasies that have been motivating us to deny ourselves or to cheat ourselves of our own bliss . . .”

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In this opening teaching from our annual Rainy Season Retreat, Shunyamurti presents the radical path to liberation described by Ramana Maharshi, Huang Po, and other great sages across spiritual traditions: the dissolution of the ego and the transcendence of thought itself. The separate self is a structure of concepts, beliefs, desires, and fears that obscures the infinite consciousness already present. Through love of God, surrender, and profound inner stillness, the mind becomes empty of its habitual chatter, and the heart opens to the fullness of divine bliss. The goal is not to accumulate more spiritual knowledge or become enlightened but to let go of the one who seeks awakening. What remains is pure presence, Sat Chit Ananda, and the spontaneous expression of divine beauty and truth in every aspect of life.

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